Abstract

Existing work on compilers has often primarily concerned itself with preserving behavior, but programs have other facets besides their observable behavior. We expect that the performance of our code is preserved and bettered by the compiler, not made worse. Unfortunately, that's exactly what sometimes occurs in modern optimizing compilers. Poor representations or incorrect optimizations may preserve the correct behavior, but push that program into a different complexity class entirely. We've seen such blowups like this occurring in practice, and many transformations have pitfalls which can cause issues. Even when a program is not dramatically worsened, it can cause the program to use more resources than expected, causing issues in resource-constrained environments, and increasing garbage-collection pauses. While several researchers have noticed potential issues, there have been a relative dearth of proofs for space-safety, and none at all concerning non-local optimizations.

This work expands upon existing notions of space-safety, allowing them to be used to reason about long-running programs with both input and output, while ensuring that the program maintains some temporal locality of space costs. In addition, this work includes new proof techniques which can handle more dramatic shifts in the program and heap structure than existing methods, as well as more frequent garbage collection. The results are formalized in Coq, including a proof of space-safety for lifting data up in scope, which increases sharing and saves duplicate work, but may also catastrophically increase space usage, if done incorrectly.

Library of Congress Subject Headings

Compilers (Computer programs); Computer software--Development--Security measures; Computer software--Reliability

Publication Date

12-2019

Document Type

Thesis

Student Type

Graduate

Degree Name

Computer Science (MS)

Department, Program, or Center

Computer Science (GCCIS)

Advisor

Matthew Fluet

Advisor/Committee Member

Ivona Bezakova

Advisor/Committee Member

Stanislaw Radziszowski

Campus

RIT – Main Campus

Plan Codes

COMPSCI-MS

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